"Iran has not attacked the US or Israel directly, or violated any airspace under their operation."
Great get out clauses you use there like "direct". Iran has been carrying out proxy war against Israel with Hezbollah and supporting militants to carry out proxy war against US and British troops in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the Afghan and Iraq government forces themselves for years now.
I'm not really one for the right wing mindset (I think the attack on Iraq was completely unjustified), but if there's one country (well two) that I have little sympathy for when it comes coming under attack from Israel and the US it's Iran and Syria, because of all the countries in the world these two have been perhaps the most pervasive in committing war by proxy, then hiding behind a false veil of "Oh, Hezbollah firing those Iranian scuds? Well shit that sucks, nothing to do with us, honest guys! WHAT? They got there via Syria? That's impossible! We'd never allow that, honest!"
Now, I understand the Iranian people, for the most part, don't even support their government, so I can't blame them, but let's not pretend Iran, the way it's run, and it's government can be allowed to get away with the proxy wars they've been running for over a decade. They've been teasing a lion, and if that lion turns round and bites them, well, cry more.
I see no evidence that Israel has pissed China off with some attack on Iran's nuclear capability (I'm assuming you're referring to Stuxnet here?). Israel is pissing everyone off, even it's own allies, with it's illegal settlement building and little else right now.
I'm not really an expert, but I didn't find it difficult to use and of all the PHP frameworks I've used I felt it was by far the cleanest. I read a Packt book when I first had to use it, I can't remember the exact name, it should be on their site, Zend Framework 1.8 or something at the time, not sure if there's a newer version. I didn't read it cover to cover either, so can't say how great it is throughout, but what I did read didn't really leave me any gaps.
I did have a technical test for it recently for a job I went for that involved integration with Dojo too and though I've never used Dojo before I didn't find it difficult finding the docs I needed. I know they're not brilliant but I think part the reason I probably find it fairly easy is that I've used various other frameworks like ASP.NET MVC and Spring quite extensively too, so being comfortable with the MVC pattern and web technologies from a general perspective probably helped me a lot with jumping into Zend too.
APK your entire life is like a great big troll against planet earth, so claiming others are trolling is arguably one of the greatest events of hypocrisy the universe has ever known.
Now I know you'll tell me that I'm the problem and you're right because PC Magazine said so in 2001 but I'm not too bothered. Winding you up could be a national sport and that's because it's so easy. People do it because they probably even feel a sense of duty in it, they probably think if they wind you up then at least you're busy copying and pasting a reply to them rather than harassing someone else.
You know, sometimes the best solution is to simply shut the fuck up. I don't expect you to get that though because What PC says you're awesome.
"To be in trouble, a design must match Apple's design patent in every single aspect. One difference, and Samsung would have been safe."
But there are differences, that's precisely the point, the Samsung tablet is a different form factor and has Samsung clearly written on the front for starters. Also, on the front, it has more buttons, it has a more easily visible light sensor. It doesn't have a curved back like the iPad either, and the sides are completely different.
Look at this suggestion Apple made:
"Display screens that are more square than rectangular or not rectangular at all"
The Galaxy Tab is more rectangular than the iPad so effectively Apple is saying your tablet can be more square, but not more rectangular. This is so utterly arbitrary that Samsung could never have won, if they'd made it more square than rectangular it would be MORE like the iPad and Apple would be saying "They could've made it more rectangular than square" such that it'd look just like it does now - look at the two:
It's nothing to do with any similarities between the iPad and the Galaxy Tab - you can point just as many differences out with the Tab as Apple's expert witness did with the prior art. This is simply about Apple tying up a threat in the courts because it can no longer compete based on technology or innovation - it's lost it's way completely.
It is a robustness issue, apparent speed is just a side effect - it means background processes (tabs) don't interfere with the foreground one, and they can load using spare CPU cycles in between the use of the current one. That means your current tab can be given priority, whilst in FF it tries to load all open tabs at once using the same process meaning that process can appear to hang whilst background tabs are busy.
It's this separation that also gives Chrome a higher initial memory footprint, but at least that's better IMO than Firefox still to this very day being horrendously leaky and using multiple gigabytes of memory by the next morning with no excuse for it.
As a developer I find Firefox to be the odd one out now in terms of standards compliance too, Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE9 all work just right when you build a page, or write some Javascript, but Firefox is now the one that regularly fucks things up and requires custom hacks.
Loss of funding will be good for them, they've lost their way and gimped their browser with shitty cruft like Themes rather than focus on a fast, standards compliant browser. It'll give them some incentive to go back to their roots and actually focus on what matters.
"The two big problems with Zend Framework is that performance is not that stellar when using the default MVC approach (in part because of the complexity of the front dispatch controller and the view structure - it's being reworked on 2.0 AFAIK)"
That's more a PHP problem than anything, such levels of complexity can be dealt with fine in JIT'd platforms like C# and Java.
"Oh, and there is the issue of Zend_Db not supporting multiple database connections - you know, when you have to load-balance you app to a backend or having a faster read-only db node just for reading."
I can't remember the details as it was over a year ago now, but doing exactly this was extremely easy in I think it was 1.8 I was using at the time.
Besides that though, if you want to build a highly scalable application then PHP is not the right technology anyway. Facebook had to completely replace the PHP interpreter for precisely this reason.
Because you can never predict every scenario that will arise.
I doubt when the extradition treaty was being written and signed that anyone thought a public prosecutor would issue an EAW because they're not part of the judiciary, but now that that situation has arisen, the question has to be dealt with, and the courts are the best place to do that.
But I'd argue again that those issues stem from PHP development in general, the whole language, much like the HTML5 spec cater to being able to do things in an incredibly awful way whilst still letting you get away with it. These sorts of technologies cater to the lowest common denominator of developer, the most incompetent kind and still let them build something that just about works.
Despite this the point is with Zend that whilst you can develop bad code with it, you don't have to, whilst just about all other PHP frameworks force you to write bad code from the outset, because as I say, they've outright designed themselves against all known definitions of MVC and the like.
When I said Zend is as good as it gets I was referring to PHP only. Things like ASP.NET MVC, and Spring are far far better, aided heavily by their related languages also following a paradigm of higher quality software development, rather than catering to the lowest common denominator like PHP.
"Minimal network load: one user event generates one server request."
That's not minimal and highlights the problem, per event is the issue and is what generates the high number of requests. It's precisely why the event based model isn't suited to the web, events on a web page only selectively require postbacks, so sending one for every event is wasteful.
"Security: JWt protects by default against the errors that are so easy made in framework (XSS, CSRF, session id stealing,...)."
That's great, but that's JWt, I was talking about Wt, which, if it's just native code opens up the door for the more serious class of exploits we've pretty much all but eliminated with managed languages, such as buffer/stack overflows that allow you to gain root access.
"What makes Wt unique is its approach: widgets. You develop web applications like you were developing desktop applications."
You mean apart from ASP.NET WebForms?
If the 90s taught us anything it's that native code on the web is a security nightmare. If WebForms taught us anything, it's that no matter how hard you try you can't sensibly mangle the web into supporting a desktop widgets style development paradigm without countless side effects (like grossly excessive postbacks).
Now I don't like to prejudge something without trying it, but this thing sounds like all my worst development nightmares come true.
Hmm, I don't mean to sound horrible, but if you're finding Zend difficult then I'm not sure you're at a skill level high enough to give a useful answer to this question.
In the world of PHP, Zend is about as good as it gets as an MVC framework, the rest have too much cruft that either require you to work to their own obscure bastardised definition of MVC, or hack around their forced methods of doing things in an ugly way.
As for my personal opinion, well, it's hard to give a single option, there isn't enough information in the original post. Frankly if they're using Microsoft hosting platforms only then C# and ASP.NET MVC are the best choice, if they're using a combination of hosting OS' and want something that's rock solid and will scale well then Java with something like Spring is the best bet, if they're more of a just get something working attitude and are not too fussed about the kind of code consistency and testability then stick to PHP and Zend, although even that's getting quite good in terms of testability now too.
If Zend knocks all the other frameworks into the long grass it's not because of any association with the PHP developers, it's because the other frameworks can't even get the simplest things right, like implementing MVC properly and because they're developed in the same inconsistent haphazard manner as PHP itself historically has been. If however you really really do need something higher level where much more is done for you, then Drupal is about the cleanest, most modular, and most well written that I have found.
No the summary is awful, when I read it I thought "Oh god, people are going to completely misunderstand that", and it seems by the second post they have.
The "public interest" bit refers to the fact that it's within the public interest to determine in British courts whether it's right for a prosecutor for the government to issue a European arrest warrant when such warrants are meant to be issued by the judiciary. It's also questioning whether Assange can even be referred to as the accused, when the Swedish police still to this date haven't yet even actually charged him with anything.
So "public interest" isn't about Assange, it's about examining the issues Assange's case raises - the public interest is ensuring justice is done, at question because it's not clear that the European Arrest Warrant has been correctly issued not whether the British people have an interest in seeing Julian himself protected.
Effectively, it would not be in the public interest for someone to be extradited if there is no legitimate legal grounds to do so, whether they're Julian Assange, Abu Hamza, or Gary McKinnon, justice must be upheld regardless of whether they're perceived middle ground, bad, or good.
"I work with some guys who do desktop and web app development who really know their stuff and have made me realise just how useful C# can be, but words like "function" and "volatile" are alien to them. I guess that is why it is to hard to find embedded developers these days."
Honestly, I don't mean to sound like I'm trolling them but the chances are if they're not comfortable with words like function and volatile then I'd question whether they really do know their stuff.
The focus within.NET and C# for the last few years has been almost entirely on parallel and functional programming. Personally I wouldn't say that someone knows their stuff RE: C# unless they can comfortably work with LINQ and Lambda expressions, and preferably PLINQ, and also have a healthy grasp of how things like expression trees are used for the DLR and such. You can't be competent with these sorts of things without understanding the likes of the volatile keyword and be comfortable with functions. Bonus points if they've made sensible use of things like Rx and F#.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post and the sentiment of it though, finding developers who do have this level of ability is nigh on impossible. I would say the vast majority of developers don't have experience beyond the basic variable declaration, control statements, and basic operators, and whilst you can do most things you want to do with just this, and hence it's where most developers think they can just stop learning it does mean they sometimes have to go an awfully long way around things, or introduce some awkward bugs that they just give up trying to solve and bill as a feature when they stumble across any kind of parallel programming problem.
Yes, people blaming Android, Google, Samsung, HTC or whatever are completely missing the point. All UK carriers have said this isn't used here in the UK, so saying "It may be on Apple, but it's not used, so it's Android's fault" is rediculous, it's clearly the fault of the carriers, else, if it was an Android problem as the OP claims, then it'd effect those of us in the UK and elsewhere too.
"You really think Murdoch babysits any of these people?"
His son James? the guy who has been implicated in having direct knowledge and acknowledgement of all this by the evidence from a number of ex-NotW staff?
Yes, I think Murdoch did babysit him, from the moment he was born to the moment he put him on the News Corp. board and beyond in fact.
If there was ever a poor example in which to question whether one person babysat another, then this would be it, because he did, quite literally. I suppose you could always blame the babysitter though, perhaps that'll be Rupert's next step when the rest of the evidence continues to prove his complicity in all this.
So what you're saying is that rather than send the money to charities they should send it through Paypal, or even better, use it to buy shares or on other financial instruments if they want to be really disruptive?
"Just like any profession, there are people who are underperforming and even incompetent, but there are certainly procedures in place to deal with them. The GTC and GTCS bar several people each year for various professional misconducts, including not being bothered to do the work properly."
Actually you're wrong, but have touched on yet another problem at the core of what is wrong with the teaching profession:
Of course these are the genuinely incompetent ones who really are awful, we're not talking about the general low standard of teaching the UK suffers - those teaching at that level aren't even classed as incompetent because the level of competence is so low, the idea of 15,000+ teachers not even competent enough to achieve even the mediocre standard we accept is pretty scary.
"By reducing the wage of teachers, you reduce the incentive for talented people to enter the profession, given that people with better classes of degree can earn more in the private sector. You then enter a downward spiral, where the losers are the children whose education is damaged."
But this is already the case, teaching is in a no man's land where we're not getting rid of the incompetent on the current wage, and where whilst wages have risen the level of competence most certainly hasn't. We can't implement stricted controls on competence because the teaching unions wont allow it thus we've settled for our current mediocre standard, and if we've settled for that then there is no justification for the current pay, we should pay to the standard we've accepted or up the standard - but with no political ability or will to up the standard only the former option is available.
"A better solution would be to tighten up on entry requirements, encourage employers to take more action against underperforming staff (the procedures are certainly there, if managers are willing to use them), and make teaching an attractive profession to go into, rather than one which is blamed for all of society's ills (at least until the bankers fucked up so spectacularly) and which people unfairly deride as being easy or full of lazy chancers who are only in it for the holidays."
But this is currently the case - many current teachers really are lazy chancers in it for the holidays, it's a sad truth. I agree that improving the profession is the best option for the country but incompetence is so deeply embedded into the profession now how do we do that other than introducing new standards and forcing every practicing teacher to re-apply for their jobs whilst also avoiding crippling strikes from the teaching units? Sorting the profession out now would require writing off a generation or two of kids altogether due to the turmoil fixing the profession would require, perhaps that's a price worth paying but as this isn't even on the political agenda right now, we might as well stop throwing money to people entirely undeserving of it and spend it where it can be of benefit - i.e. improved secondary school wages (where that segment of the profession is salvageable because the increased difficulty of secondary teaching does put off many of the wasters plaguing primary teaching), improve other services, or simply cut taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
It'd be even more funny if that happened after Apple had been made to pay for millions in lost sales caused by the ban they requested.
I read it for what it was, but then, I suppose I was aware of the legal tussle in Australia between Samsung and Apple.
"Iran has not attacked the US or Israel directly, or violated any airspace under their operation."
Great get out clauses you use there like "direct". Iran has been carrying out proxy war against Israel with Hezbollah and supporting militants to carry out proxy war against US and British troops in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and the Afghan and Iraq government forces themselves for years now.
I'm not really one for the right wing mindset (I think the attack on Iraq was completely unjustified), but if there's one country (well two) that I have little sympathy for when it comes coming under attack from Israel and the US it's Iran and Syria, because of all the countries in the world these two have been perhaps the most pervasive in committing war by proxy, then hiding behind a false veil of "Oh, Hezbollah firing those Iranian scuds? Well shit that sucks, nothing to do with us, honest guys! WHAT? They got there via Syria? That's impossible! We'd never allow that, honest!"
Now, I understand the Iranian people, for the most part, don't even support their government, so I can't blame them, but let's not pretend Iran, the way it's run, and it's government can be allowed to get away with the proxy wars they've been running for over a decade. They've been teasing a lion, and if that lion turns round and bites them, well, cry more.
I see no evidence that Israel has pissed China off with some attack on Iran's nuclear capability (I'm assuming you're referring to Stuxnet here?). Israel is pissing everyone off, even it's own allies, with it's illegal settlement building and little else right now.
The Daily Mail fabricate a story?
Next you'll be telling me they were involved in phone hacking!
No, seriously though, if it's by the Daily Mail they're probably actually projecting what they'd like to happen, rather than what actually happened.
So the moral of the story, the story being Pearl Harbour, is don't trust FedEx?
Yes
"As the article calls out, do we know what the impact to an ecosystem where a species like this is released? What about natural predation?"
No problem, we'll just have to bring back T-Rexs and Velociraptors too.
I'm not really an expert, but I didn't find it difficult to use and of all the PHP frameworks I've used I felt it was by far the cleanest. I read a Packt book when I first had to use it, I can't remember the exact name, it should be on their site, Zend Framework 1.8 or something at the time, not sure if there's a newer version. I didn't read it cover to cover either, so can't say how great it is throughout, but what I did read didn't really leave me any gaps.
I did have a technical test for it recently for a job I went for that involved integration with Dojo too and though I've never used Dojo before I didn't find it difficult finding the docs I needed. I know they're not brilliant but I think part the reason I probably find it fairly easy is that I've used various other frameworks like ASP.NET MVC and Spring quite extensively too, so being comfortable with the MVC pattern and web technologies from a general perspective probably helped me a lot with jumping into Zend too.
Is that a tear I see?
APK your entire life is like a great big troll against planet earth, so claiming others are trolling is arguably one of the greatest events of hypocrisy the universe has ever known.
Now I know you'll tell me that I'm the problem and you're right because PC Magazine said so in 2001 but I'm not too bothered. Winding you up could be a national sport and that's because it's so easy. People do it because they probably even feel a sense of duty in it, they probably think if they wind you up then at least you're busy copying and pasting a reply to them rather than harassing someone else.
You know, sometimes the best solution is to simply shut the fuck up. I don't expect you to get that though because What PC says you're awesome.
"And apparently they copied the charger? This is beyond vapid. It's a cuboid with two pins on the end"
Pfft, that's 3 pins in our neck of the woods thank you very much!
"To be in trouble, a design must match Apple's design patent in every single aspect. One difference, and Samsung would have been safe."
But there are differences, that's precisely the point, the Samsung tablet is a different form factor and has Samsung clearly written on the front for starters. Also, on the front, it has more buttons, it has a more easily visible light sensor. It doesn't have a curved back like the iPad either, and the sides are completely different.
Look at this suggestion Apple made:
"Display screens that are more square than rectangular or not rectangular at all"
The Galaxy Tab is more rectangular than the iPad so effectively Apple is saying your tablet can be more square, but not more rectangular. This is so utterly arbitrary that Samsung could never have won, if they'd made it more square than rectangular it would be MORE like the iPad and Apple would be saying "They could've made it more rectangular than square" such that it'd look just like it does now - look at the two:
http://www.2-soft.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/iPad-vs-Galaxy-tab.jpg
It's nothing to do with any similarities between the iPad and the Galaxy Tab - you can point just as many differences out with the Tab as Apple's expert witness did with the prior art. This is simply about Apple tying up a threat in the courts because it can no longer compete based on technology or innovation - it's lost it's way completely.
It is a robustness issue, apparent speed is just a side effect - it means background processes (tabs) don't interfere with the foreground one, and they can load using spare CPU cycles in between the use of the current one. That means your current tab can be given priority, whilst in FF it tries to load all open tabs at once using the same process meaning that process can appear to hang whilst background tabs are busy.
It's this separation that also gives Chrome a higher initial memory footprint, but at least that's better IMO than Firefox still to this very day being horrendously leaky and using multiple gigabytes of memory by the next morning with no excuse for it.
As a developer I find Firefox to be the odd one out now in terms of standards compliance too, Chrome, Opera, Safari, IE9 all work just right when you build a page, or write some Javascript, but Firefox is now the one that regularly fucks things up and requires custom hacks.
Loss of funding will be good for them, they've lost their way and gimped their browser with shitty cruft like Themes rather than focus on a fast, standards compliant browser. It'll give them some incentive to go back to their roots and actually focus on what matters.
"The two big problems with Zend Framework is that performance is not that stellar when using the default MVC approach (in part because of the complexity of the front dispatch controller and the view structure - it's being reworked on 2.0 AFAIK)"
That's more a PHP problem than anything, such levels of complexity can be dealt with fine in JIT'd platforms like C# and Java.
"Oh, and there is the issue of Zend_Db not supporting multiple database connections - you know, when you have to load-balance you app to a backend or having a faster read-only db node just for reading."
I can't remember the details as it was over a year ago now, but doing exactly this was extremely easy in I think it was 1.8 I was using at the time.
Besides that though, if you want to build a highly scalable application then PHP is not the right technology anyway. Facebook had to completely replace the PHP interpreter for precisely this reason.
Because you can never predict every scenario that will arise.
I doubt when the extradition treaty was being written and signed that anyone thought a public prosecutor would issue an EAW because they're not part of the judiciary, but now that that situation has arisen, the question has to be dealt with, and the courts are the best place to do that.
But I'd argue again that those issues stem from PHP development in general, the whole language, much like the HTML5 spec cater to being able to do things in an incredibly awful way whilst still letting you get away with it. These sorts of technologies cater to the lowest common denominator of developer, the most incompetent kind and still let them build something that just about works.
Despite this the point is with Zend that whilst you can develop bad code with it, you don't have to, whilst just about all other PHP frameworks force you to write bad code from the outset, because as I say, they've outright designed themselves against all known definitions of MVC and the like.
When I said Zend is as good as it gets I was referring to PHP only. Things like ASP.NET MVC, and Spring are far far better, aided heavily by their related languages also following a paradigm of higher quality software development, rather than catering to the lowest common denominator like PHP.
"Minimal network load: one user event generates one server request."
That's not minimal and highlights the problem, per event is the issue and is what generates the high number of requests. It's precisely why the event based model isn't suited to the web, events on a web page only selectively require postbacks, so sending one for every event is wasteful.
"Security: JWt protects by default against the errors that are so easy made in framework (XSS, CSRF, session id stealing, ...)."
That's great, but that's JWt, I was talking about Wt, which, if it's just native code opens up the door for the more serious class of exploits we've pretty much all but eliminated with managed languages, such as buffer/stack overflows that allow you to gain root access.
"What makes Wt unique is its approach: widgets. You develop web applications like you were developing desktop applications."
You mean apart from ASP.NET WebForms?
If the 90s taught us anything it's that native code on the web is a security nightmare. If WebForms taught us anything, it's that no matter how hard you try you can't sensibly mangle the web into supporting a desktop widgets style development paradigm without countless side effects (like grossly excessive postbacks).
Now I don't like to prejudge something without trying it, but this thing sounds like all my worst development nightmares come true.
Hmm, I don't mean to sound horrible, but if you're finding Zend difficult then I'm not sure you're at a skill level high enough to give a useful answer to this question.
In the world of PHP, Zend is about as good as it gets as an MVC framework, the rest have too much cruft that either require you to work to their own obscure bastardised definition of MVC, or hack around their forced methods of doing things in an ugly way.
As for my personal opinion, well, it's hard to give a single option, there isn't enough information in the original post. Frankly if they're using Microsoft hosting platforms only then C# and ASP.NET MVC are the best choice, if they're using a combination of hosting OS' and want something that's rock solid and will scale well then Java with something like Spring is the best bet, if they're more of a just get something working attitude and are not too fussed about the kind of code consistency and testability then stick to PHP and Zend, although even that's getting quite good in terms of testability now too.
If Zend knocks all the other frameworks into the long grass it's not because of any association with the PHP developers, it's because the other frameworks can't even get the simplest things right, like implementing MVC properly and because they're developed in the same inconsistent haphazard manner as PHP itself historically has been. If however you really really do need something higher level where much more is done for you, then Drupal is about the cleanest, most modular, and most well written that I have found.
No the summary is awful, when I read it I thought "Oh god, people are going to completely misunderstand that", and it seems by the second post they have.
The "public interest" bit refers to the fact that it's within the public interest to determine in British courts whether it's right for a prosecutor for the government to issue a European arrest warrant when such warrants are meant to be issued by the judiciary. It's also questioning whether Assange can even be referred to as the accused, when the Swedish police still to this date haven't yet even actually charged him with anything.
So "public interest" isn't about Assange, it's about examining the issues Assange's case raises - the public interest is ensuring justice is done, at question because it's not clear that the European Arrest Warrant has been correctly issued not whether the British people have an interest in seeing Julian himself protected.
Effectively, it would not be in the public interest for someone to be extradited if there is no legitimate legal grounds to do so, whether they're Julian Assange, Abu Hamza, or Gary McKinnon, justice must be upheld regardless of whether they're perceived middle ground, bad, or good.
"I work with some guys who do desktop and web app development who really know their stuff and have made me realise just how useful C# can be, but words like "function" and "volatile" are alien to them. I guess that is why it is to hard to find embedded developers these days."
Honestly, I don't mean to sound like I'm trolling them but the chances are if they're not comfortable with words like function and volatile then I'd question whether they really do know their stuff.
The focus within .NET and C# for the last few years has been almost entirely on parallel and functional programming. Personally I wouldn't say that someone knows their stuff RE: C# unless they can comfortably work with LINQ and Lambda expressions, and preferably PLINQ, and also have a healthy grasp of how things like expression trees are used for the DLR and such. You can't be competent with these sorts of things without understanding the likes of the volatile keyword and be comfortable with functions. Bonus points if they've made sensible use of things like Rx and F#.
I don't disagree with the rest of your post and the sentiment of it though, finding developers who do have this level of ability is nigh on impossible. I would say the vast majority of developers don't have experience beyond the basic variable declaration, control statements, and basic operators, and whilst you can do most things you want to do with just this, and hence it's where most developers think they can just stop learning it does mean they sometimes have to go an awfully long way around things, or introduce some awkward bugs that they just give up trying to solve and bill as a feature when they stumble across any kind of parallel programming problem.
Yes, people blaming Android, Google, Samsung, HTC or whatever are completely missing the point. All UK carriers have said this isn't used here in the UK, so saying "It may be on Apple, but it's not used, so it's Android's fault" is rediculous, it's clearly the fault of the carriers, else, if it was an Android problem as the OP claims, then it'd effect those of us in the UK and elsewhere too.
"You really think Murdoch babysits any of these people?"
His son James? the guy who has been implicated in having direct knowledge and acknowledgement of all this by the evidence from a number of ex-NotW staff?
Yes, I think Murdoch did babysit him, from the moment he was born to the moment he put him on the News Corp. board and beyond in fact.
If there was ever a poor example in which to question whether one person babysat another, then this would be it, because he did, quite literally. I suppose you could always blame the babysitter though, perhaps that'll be Rupert's next step when the rest of the evidence continues to prove his complicity in all this.
So what you're saying is that rather than send the money to charities they should send it through Paypal, or even better, use it to buy shares or on other financial instruments if they want to be really disruptive?
"Just like any profession, there are people who are underperforming and even incompetent, but there are certainly procedures in place to deal with them. The GTC and GTCS bar several people each year for various professional misconducts, including not being bothered to do the work properly."
Actually you're wrong, but have touched on yet another problem at the core of what is wrong with the teaching profession:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10464617
Of course these are the genuinely incompetent ones who really are awful, we're not talking about the general low standard of teaching the UK suffers - those teaching at that level aren't even classed as incompetent because the level of competence is so low, the idea of 15,000+ teachers not even competent enough to achieve even the mediocre standard we accept is pretty scary.
"By reducing the wage of teachers, you reduce the incentive for talented people to enter the profession, given that people with better classes of degree can earn more in the private sector. You then enter a downward spiral, where the losers are the children whose education is damaged."
But this is already the case, teaching is in a no man's land where we're not getting rid of the incompetent on the current wage, and where whilst wages have risen the level of competence most certainly hasn't. We can't implement stricted controls on competence because the teaching unions wont allow it thus we've settled for our current mediocre standard, and if we've settled for that then there is no justification for the current pay, we should pay to the standard we've accepted or up the standard - but with no political ability or will to up the standard only the former option is available.
"A better solution would be to tighten up on entry requirements, encourage employers to take more action against underperforming staff (the procedures are certainly there, if managers are willing to use them), and make teaching an attractive profession to go into, rather than one which is blamed for all of society's ills (at least until the bankers fucked up so spectacularly) and which people unfairly deride as being easy or full of lazy chancers who are only in it for the holidays."
But this is currently the case - many current teachers really are lazy chancers in it for the holidays, it's a sad truth. I agree that improving the profession is the best option for the country but incompetence is so deeply embedded into the profession now how do we do that other than introducing new standards and forcing every practicing teacher to re-apply for their jobs whilst also avoiding crippling strikes from the teaching units? Sorting the profession out now would require writing off a generation or two of kids altogether due to the turmoil fixing the profession would require, perhaps that's a price worth paying but as this isn't even on the political agenda right now, we might as well stop throwing money to people entirely undeserving of it and spend it where it can be of benefit - i.e. improved secondary school wages (where that segment of the profession is salvageable because the increased difficulty of secondary teaching does put off many of the wasters plaguing primary teaching), improve other services, or simply cut taxes.